Various methods of providing multimedia conferencing services with guaranteed performance have been developed. Multimedia conference calls require a large amount of communication bandwidth. Cable television (CATV) hybrid fiber-coaxial (HFC) plants, having a large excess bandwidth, are an ideal candidate to provide the infrastructure necessary for multimedia conferencing services for offices and homes. However, although these "tree-type" cable network topologies are currently suitable for one-way distribution, such as broadcasting television signals from a cable headend to all end points distributed across the cable network, the existing network topology would require different intelligent networking technologies to perform two-way communications, such as providing multimedia conferencing over a hybrid fiber-coaxial (HFC) cable network.